"Gun-Free Zones"

The bucolic campus of
Virginia Tech University, in Blacksburg, Va., would seem to have little
in common with the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City. Yet
both share an important characteristic, common to the site of almost
every other notorious mass murder in recent years: They are “gun free
zones.”

Forty American states now
have “shall issue” or similar laws, by which officials issue a pistol
carry permit upon request to any adult who passes a background check and
(in most states) a safety class. Research by Carlisle Moody of the
College of William and Mary, and others, suggests that these law
provide law-abiding citizens some protection against violent crime. But
in many states there are certain places, especially schools, set aside
as off-limits for guns. In Virginia, universities aren’t “gun-free
zones” by statute, but college officials are allowed to impose anti-gun
rules. The result is that mass murderers know where they can commit
their crimes.

Private property owners
also have the right to prohibit lawful gun possession. And a some
shopping malls have adopted anti-gun rules. Trolley Square was one, as
announced by an unequivocal sign, “No weapons allowed on Trolley Square
property.”

In February of this year
a young man walked past the sign prohibiting him from carrying a gun on
the premises and began shooting people who moments earlier where
leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed five.

Fortunately, someone
else—off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer Kenneth Hammond—also did not
comply with the mall’s rules. After hearing “popping” sounds, Mr.
Hammond investigated and immediately opened fire on the gunman. With his
aggressive response, Mr. Hammond prevented other innocent bystanders
from getting hurt. He bought time for the local police to respond, while
stopping the gunman from hunting down other victims.

At Virginia Tech’s
sprawling campus in southwestern Va., the local police arrived at the
engineering building a few minutes after the start of the murder spree,
and after a few critical minutes, broke through the doors that Cho
Seung-Hui had apparently chained shut. From what we know now, Cho,
committed suicide when he realized he’d soon be confronted by the
police. But by then, 30 people had been murdered.

But let’s take a step
back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature defeated a bill that
would have ended the “gun free zones” in Virginia’s public universities.
At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice president praised the
General Assembly’s action “because this will help parents, students,
faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” In an August 2006
editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: “Guns don’t belong in
classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy
preventing same.”

Actually, Virginia Tech’s
policy only made the killer safer, for it was only the law-abiding
victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from having guns.
Virginia Tech’s policy bans all guns on campus (except for police and
the university’s own security guards); even faculty members are
prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.

Virginia Tech thus went
out of its way to prevent what happened at a Pearl, Miss., high school
in 1997, where assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a handgun from
his car and apprehended a school shooter. Or what happened at
Appalachian Law School, in Grundy, Va., in 2002, when a mass-murder was
stopped by two students with law-enforcement experience, one of whom
retrieved his own gun from his vehicle. Or in Edinboro, Pa., a few days
after the Pearl event, when a school attack ended after a nearby
merchant used a shotgun to force the attacker to desist. Law-abiding
citizens routinely defend themselves with firearms. Annually, Americans
drive-off home invaders a half-million times, according to a 1997 study
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Utah, there is no “gun
free schools” exception to the licensed carry law. In K-12 schools and
in universities, teachers and other adults can and do legally carry
concealed guns. In Utah, there has never been a Columbine-style attack
on a school. Nor has there been any of the incidents predicted by
self-defense opponents—such as a teacher drawing a gun on a
disrespectful student, or a student stealing a teacher’s gun.

Israel uses armed
teachers as part of a successful program to deter terrorist attacks on
schools. Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand are following the
Israeli example, because of Islamist terrorism.

After the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks in the U.S., long-time gun control advocates,
including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), agreed that making airplane
cockpits into “gun free zones” had made airplanes much more dangerous
for everyone except hijackers. Corrective legislation, supported by
large bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, allowed pilots
to carry firearms, while imposing rigorous gun-safety training on
pilots who want to carry.

In many states, “gun free
schools” legislation was enacted hastily in the late 1980s or early
1990s due to concerns about juvenile crime. Aimed at juvenile gangsters,
the poorly-written and overbroad statutes had the disastrous consequence
of rendering teachers unable to protect their students.

Reasonable advocates of
gun control can still press for a wide variety of items on their agenda,
while helping to reform the “gun free zones” that have become attractive
havens for mass killers. If legislators or administrators want to
require extensive additional training for armed faculty and other
adults, that’s fine. Better that some victims be armed than none at all.

The founder of the
University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, understood the harms resulting
from the type of policy created at Virginia Tech. In his “Commonplace
Book,” Jefferson copied a passage from Cesare Beccaria, the founder of
criminology, which was as true on Monday as it always has been:

“Laws that forbid the
carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the
assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage
than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with
greater confidence than an armed man.”

Mr. Kopel is research director of the
Independence Institute in Golden, Colo., and co-author of the law school
textbook “Gun Control and Gun Rights” (NYU Press).

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